By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

The Challenge of the Gilets Jaunes to the French Government

Following the astonishing display of violence in Paris on
the third weekend of the hitherto peaceful gilets
jaunes (yellow vest) protests in France — the worst
rioting in the country since the student uprising of May 1968 —
the movement has suddenly been transformed into a major crisis for the
presidency of Emmanuel Macron. This was aptly symbolized by the storming
of the Arc de Triomphe and the brutal defacing of the statue of
Marianne — the personification
of the revolutionary values of liberté, égalité, fraternité, and of the French Republic itself.

In her analysis of the crisis, Chantal
Mouffe notes that “the gilets
jaunes movement reminds us how important emotions are in politics.
Something that technocrats have totally forgotten.” In particular, the anger of
the gilets jaunes stems from “the
explosion of economic inequalities between a group of super-rich and the middle
class.” The people’s anger over their economic precarity has been exacerbated
by the “crisis of political representation,” in which “citizens feel that they
have no real choice between the political options on offer,” which hence has
led to their realization that “the government’s policy can only now be opposed
in the street.” Concurring, Frédéric Lordon highlights the fury of the gilets jaunes:

“Quite simply, you are enraged when you are pushed to the
limit. The fact is that after thirty years of neoliberalism, topped up by
eighteen months of Macron’s rabid social warfare, entire social groups have
been pushed to the limit … Believing that what they are talking about doesn’t
exist, the media didn’t see these enraged people coming. But here they are, the
result of a long and silent accumulation of anger, which has just broken its
dam. They will not easily be brought back into the fold. All the less so,
since, with the naivety of ‘good people’, they experienced police violence on
what was for many of them their first demonstration. At first, they were
flabbergasted. Then, having recovered, inoculated for good.”

This anger energizes the gilets
jaunes, many of whom became street
fighters in Paris on the violent third weekend of the protests.
These “self-proclaimed fighters,” who have “diffuse demands” and “no real
organization or visible leader,” organized themselves for the protests through
social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Their self-organization
through social media platforms is particularly ironic given that many of the
protestors have suffered immiseration precisely because of the French
government’s embrace of new digital technologies — for instance, the government’s devastating deregulation
of the taxi industry and its embrace of ride-sharing apps. As one aggrieved
taxi driver bitterly complained about Macron:

“He ruined us, he broke our business. He wants everything
new, digital, the new world, and he did it all without thinking of the cost for
us. Replace everyone, have everything young, new? Yeah, well that’s not how you
do things. Now it’s payback time.”

The lack
of a unified political agenda among the gilets jaunes is striking: “Some want to restore the wealth tax,
increasing pensions, raising the minimum wage, cutting the salaries of
politicians, and even to Macron resigning and replacing the National Assembly
with a ‘people’s council.’” Unlike other populist
movements that have emerged in recent years, the gilets jaunes movement “is not tethered
to a political party, let alone to a right-wing one. It is not focusing on race
or migration, and those issues do not appear on the Yellow Vests’ list of
complaints. It is not led by a single fire-breathing leader. Nationalism is not
on the agenda.” Antonio Negri observes that the gilets jaunes movement
is “a contradictory movement, divided internally along territorial,
generational and class lines, among many others; what unifies it is the refusal
to negotiate, the refusal to take a chance on the existing political
structures.” Indeed, while the movement has its representatives, it is
“essentially leaderless,” which has created significant
difficulties for the French government’s attempts to negotiate with
the protestors.

Following the unexpected violence of the third weekend of
the gilets jaunes protests in Paris,
the French state was better prepared for the
fourth weekend, detaining almost 1,400 protestors across the country
“before they could even reach the central site of the demonstrations along
Paris’s main artery, the Champs-Élysées.” Within Paris, “the riot police fired
tear gas and water cannons to control the crowds.” While such police actions
may eventually end the gilets jaunes protests, the political damage the protests have done to Macron will not be so
easy to repair.

What made Macron’s proposed carbon tax sting even more
was his abolition in 2017 of the wealth tax,
which meant that the “benefits cuts and tax changes in 2018 and 2019 will leave
the bottom fifth of households worse off, while … the biggest gains will go to
the top 1 per cent.”

The calls for Macron to resign, coupled with his plummeting
approval ratings, have led to a significant decline in his political standing.
As Gregory
Viscusi notes: “Macron’s policies are seen to favor the wealthy, and
poll after poll have shown the French electorate thinks the former banker is
aloof and arrogant. His approval rating is at 28 percent, according to an
average of seven polling institutes.” While the 2022 French presidential
elections are still some time away, “European elections and a series of
municipal and regional votes over the next two years could shape up as
referendums on his policies.”

The gilets jaunes protests have also damaged the environmentalist cause of carbon
taxes, that is, taxes on “gasoline, diesel, coal and natural gas”
which are intended to “help pay for the damage they cause, encourage people to
use less, and make it easier for cleaner alternatives and fuel-saving
technologies to compete.” Macron’s proposed hikes in gasoline and diesel taxes — which have since
been cancelled following the violent third weekend of the gilets jaunes protests — were “seen as
especially unfair to the working classes in the provinces who need cars to get
to work and whose incomes have stagnated for years.” This is especially
the case in France since “four-fifths of commuters drive to work and
a third of them cover more than 30km each way.”

While
commentators like Leonid
Bershidsky have argued that the proposed fuel tax hikes were
actually insignificant — costing “less than two McDonald’s meals” — it’s
important to remember that whether something is seen as expensive or cheap
depends on one’s income. The French
have suffered “declining living standards and eroding purchasing
power,” and many of the gilets jaunes “are protesting how difficult it is to pay rent, feed their families and simply
scrape by as living costs — most notably fuel prices — keep rising while their
household incomes barely budge.”

As Adam
Nossiter points out, the French poor who make up the angry gilets jaunes protestors find it
difficult to make ends meet, and Macron’s proposed carbon tax was the straw
that broke the camel’s back. As one testified: “We live with stress. Every
month, at the end of the month, we say, ‘Will there be enough to eat?’” Indeed,
the depth of the financial stress felt by the French poor can be seen in the
fact that, under the Macron government, France has become “the most
heavily taxed of the world’s rich countries.” Given the weight of
such financial stress, Macron’s appeal to environmentalism was felt like a slap
on the face. As another gilet jaune put it: “The citizens have asked for lower taxes, and they’re saying, ‘Ecology.’”

The anger and distress of the protestors is aptly reflected
in their chosen symbol
of protest: their yellow high-visibility safety vests. Intended for
use as a distress signal in case of a traffic accident, all motorists in France
are required to keep one in their vehicles. (There are similar laws in
neighboring countries, and as we shall see, the gilets jaunes protests have likewise spread out of France.) Their
deployment in the protests hence shows on a visual level the distress the
protestors feel about their economic precarity. The powerful symbolism has also
allowed aggrieved people in other social sectors such as high
school students to participate in the protests, thereby expanding
the gilets jaunes movement into other
social fields.

Environmental economists hence see the gilets jaunes protests as a warning that carbon taxes have to be paired
with initiatives that “enhance the welfare and incomes” of the poor. Indeed, Borenstein
and Charlton note that the gilets
jaunes protests are hardly the first acts of public resistance against fuel
price hikes and carbon taxes: “In September, protests in India over high
gasoline prices shut down schools and government offices. Protests erupted in
Mexico in 2017 after government deregulation caused a spike in gasoline prices,
and in Indonesia in 2013 when the government reduced fuel subsidies and prices
rose. In the United States, Washington state voters handily defeated a carbon tax
in November.”

What made Macron’s proposed carbon tax sting even more was
his abolition in 2017 of the wealth
tax, which meant that the “benefits cuts and tax changes in 2018 and
2019 will leave the bottom fifth of households worse off, while … the biggest
gains will go to the top 1 per cent.” While the reform was intended to “encourage
more savings to be channeled into the real economy,” it has instead led the gilets jaunes to see Macron as a “president
of the rich.” Following the violent third weekend of the gilets jaunes protests, Macron’s government has suggested that the
wealth tax may be
reinstated.

Ominously, the gilets
jaunes protests have spread to Belgium
and the Netherlands. In both cases the protesters “appeared to hail
at least in part from a populist movement that is angry at government policy in
general and what it sees as the widening gulf between mainstream politicians
and the voters who put them in power.” As one elderly Dutch protester
explained: “Our children are hard-working people but they have to pay taxes
everywhere. You can’t get housing anymore. It is not going well in Dutch
society. The social welfare net we grew up with is gone.” The gilets jaunes have even inspired protesters
in Iraq. The contagious nature of the gilets jaunes protests suggests that it is well on its way to
becoming a normalized political phenomenon not just in France but also in Western
Europe and beyond.

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP). He is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013) and is the lead editor of China and Southeast Asia in the Xi Jinping Era (Lexington Books 2019). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.